Artificial Italo by Sir Real feat. Libbertine

12" VINYL ALBUM VERSION AVAILABLE HERE!!! ALL 8 TRACKS IN A BEAUTIFUL FULL COLOUR SLEEVE AND INNER!!!

https://elasticstage.com/sirreal/releases/artificial-italo-album

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Anyone who knows me will know that I'm a space cadet at heart, and in musical terms I can trace my love for all things cosmic back to my first proper exposure to electronic music back in the late 70's, listening to my brothers Jean-Michel Jarre albums - I loved the spaciousness and sci-fi quality, it took me to a place in my head that I was previously unaware of.

Fast forward a few years (via love for other synth giants like Ultravox and Depeche Mode amongst numerous others), and during my burgeoning love for dance music at the start of the 90's I discovered a style of music previously completely unknown to me. Under the very loose banner of 'Italo' or 'cosmic disco', I had found music that covered many of the aspects of music that I held dear - it was unashamedly 'spacey' and electronic, had (at the time) quite high production values, the lyrics were often cheesy but usually optimistic, and (crucially) it smashed it out of the park on the dancefloor. Frequently covering themes of 'futuristic' technology, or with a sci-fi aspect, I was - of course - immediately enamoured.

Fast forward many more years, to the present time (well, about a year ago when I started this project) - and following an epiphany when I heard John Grant playing a wonderful track called 'Ti Sento' by Matia Bazar during a DJ takeover on 6Music - I realised that despite having produced numerous styles of all sorts of music over the last 30 years or so, I'd never had a go at writing anything along these lines. The stage was set. I planned to write a number of unashamedly 'commercial' songs loosely based around my take on Italo / cosmic disco / Euro pop. I was also taken by the idea of trying to write 'pop' music, something that I had struggled with on several occasions - and discovered how difficult it is to write upbeat and straightforward pop tunes. I've always found it much easier to write melancholic / weird / dark music.

I came up with a 'concept' for an EP, it was to be based upon aspects of the relationship between humans and AI - which was, at the start of 2024, at a point where it was really starting to accelerate and gaining an awful lot of attention - not least from myself. The discussion over the impact of AI has, understandably as it starts to impact on peoples' lives in ever more 'real' ways, become increasingly heated. There are undoubtedly numerous aspects of the way in which is it currently being utilised and monetised that are far from ideal, and yet I still remain optimistic that human ingenuity may yet be able to guide the process in a way that ends up beneficial.

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I realise this is a lot to read, but as a postscript I thought I'd add my 'process' for anyone who might be interested!

So obviously, given the 'concept' of the EP, I was interested to integrate AI into my workflow where appropriate. In the end, this manifested in several ways.

- All of the tracks were written by myself from scratch, in a couple of sections I used the website udio.com to add some small details, but 99% of the music was my inspiration, my writing, my production

- All of the lyrics were originally drafted by ChatGPT, using careful prompts from myself. I then edited to remove certain parts that I didn't like, rephrased in places, but the final lyrics are probably about 90% 'original' from Chat GPT. I liked that the content was slightly 'cheesy' / 'naive', as that seemed appropriate given the retro-futurist angle I was going for (and asked for in my prompts), and the frequent lyrical style and topics of original Italo and Euro-pop.

- I then again used the website udio.com to 'sing' the lyrics, I used these vocals in all of my original demos. I presented these demos to Libbertine (and Lawrence Duke from Chrysalid Homo who features on 'Infranatural', albeit heavily vocoded), who re-sang and re-interpreted these original vocal demos. In the final mixes, there are just a few backing vocals remaining from the original mixes.

- The artwork was created in Midjourney, and then some post-production work (mainly typesetting and layout) was done by myself in Photoshop. I also tried to use ChatGPT to help me create a font based upon some Midjourney-created text (the 'Artificial Italo' lettering on the front cover). That was an interesting process which required a lot of re-iterations to try get it close enough, but in the end it just couldn't do it to my satisfaction - a good indication of possibilities and limitations of current AI.

The whole process has been a very interesting insight into where I believe we're heading now - I have zero doubt that within a very short time all of these processes will be fully realisable with AI, to a quality that will be indistinguishable from fully 'human' creations. Many creatives / artists / musicians are rightly concerned about how this will impact upon their careers, and honestly I have no comfort to offer there - a lot of people will lose their jobs - but given that this tidal wave is heading our way, whether we like it or not, I see no option but to try and remain positive and, where we can, use the technology to aid us where possible. We should also try and petition governments and corporations to 'build better', as we might do with any other area where we feel disempowered or helpless. How it will all turn out in the end is anyone's guess, even AI 'experts' find it hard to agree on that!

[k]racktroni[k] was born in 2000, originally as an outlet for the wealth of electro talent to be found in the UK's second city, Birmingham (much of which was in turn born out of notorious & legendary techno club 'House of God'). However over the years it grew beyond that, and was proud to release music from artists such as Eon, Snog, Bass Kittens, Al ('Tourettes') Storey and many more...